Tuesday, November 18, 2008

In the spirit of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday (and under the advice of my therapist at the free clinic) I decided to showcase my gratitude early and share what I have to be thankful for over the past eleven months. I hope you are moved in turn to respond with your own list or just send a check made out to “Cash.”

• A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, for proving what I have always said—that a perfectly acceptable holiday feast can consist of jelly beans, toast, popcorn and pretzel sticks served on a ping-pong table and catered by a dog and bird.• Jehovah’s Witnesses, because it’s nice to have company stop by every so often.• The eight pounds I lost on the Atkins Diet, on top of the 20 lost due to poor grocery budgeting.• My new personal motto, “Never give up, never surrender” (replacing my old mantra, “Oh Christ, it’s morning”). • Learning from flyer on street light that my current residence is to be replaced with Super Target, meaning greater access to low, low prices. • Lots and lots and lots of Effexor.

With Halloween over, thanksgiving an apparent afterthought and fourth-quarter profits on the line, companies have long ago officially started the countdown to Christmas, Chanukah and—for those of you who find Mother Jones magazine to be just right of The Weekly Standard—Winter Solstice. But what as American consumers can we do to ensure that both Baby Jesus and Best Buy executives have beatific smiles come December 25th, especially in this particular dismal economic climate? Why, with the following...

The Make-Corporate-America-Happy Holiday ChecklistNov. 16-22: Buy video game versions of every single movie that came out this year, even if it means surprising your child with The Love Guru: The Adventure Begins for their PSP.

Nov. 23-29: Purchase special "limited edition" holiday-theme versions of Starbucks Coffee, M&M's and the BMW 7 Series for Neiman Marcus.

Nov. 30-Dec. 6: Load up on toys based on Nickelodeon, Noggin and PBSKids characters that—thanks to your child's excessive viewing habits—you're now more familiar with than most historical figures or relatives.

Dec. 7-13: Drive from mall to mall to mall, asking questions like "Is the 'Yu-Gi-Oh Evolution Starter Deck: Yugi' compatible with the 'Exodia,' 'Gravekeeper's' and 'Ritual Monster' decks?" with a completely straight face.

Dec. 14-20: Let last-minute panic dictate purchase decisions. Toss whatever is on the shelf into your cart, even if no one in your family specifically requested a 12-count of D-handle routers.

Dec. 21-25: Hang in there to the very end. Be the person store security has to forcibly evict from "housewares" because it's 12 A.M. Christmas morning and your family reported you missing 12 days ago.

Now that we have officially entered Thanksgiving Season--as heralded by the end of Halloween and the start of innumerable Williams Sonoma catalogs--I'd like to take this opportunity to celebrate and delineate the glory that is the "turducken," a smorgasbord of slaughter that, had a child invented it, would no doubt have been perceived as the first sign of a serial killer.

For those of you not in the know or who never had a lesson in informal etymology, a "turducken" is a deboned chicken stuffed inside a deboned duck, which is then stuffed inside a deboned turkey. Why the turkey is then not stuffed inside a deboned cow and then quickly shoved into an unsuspecting pachyderm or stunned gorilla may have less to do with people realizing when a drinking game has clearly gone too far and more to do with the fact that the standard oven can only contain so much carcass.

Historians of nesting-doll food preparation cite that the layering (or, as it is known in Drakes Cakes circles, "Yodeling") of animals harkens back to the Middle Ages, when farmers often hid livestock inside one another to avoid paying higher husbandry taxes, to conceal potential golden-egg-laying geese from brigands or to give themselves something else to do besides toil, pray and attribute the rising of the sun to a complex system of pulleys operated by the same spirits whose sneezes produced morning dew.

However, legend--not to mention a well-researched "National Geographic" article--traces the origin of the triple-decker dinner to a specialty meats shop in Louisiana, where the inventive provisions staff has also been recognized for installing a combustible engine inside a pig and attaching the hindquarters of an iguana to the body of a possum and the head of a teddy bear, thereby fashioning a chimera well within the price range of even the most parsimonious Christmas shopper. Others, though, attribute the turducken to Paul Prudhomme, a rather gargantuan Cajun chef popular in the 1980's and most notable for scaring doppelganger character actor Dom DeLuise into the occasional weight-loss program.

Alas, as with most things that initially attain a cult status before gaining greater acceptance and then eventually becoming a global irritant, the turducken community has experienced its own schism, with many demanding that the dish instead be labeled a "chuckey," thereby reversing the order of fowl importance but in no way impeding the madness. Violence has quickly spread between the two factions, and as of this writing many have sacrificed their lives in the name of a complex recipe that by all rights should really be called "dicky."

Please join me next time when I show how to flash-fry a gingerbread house.

Of the above the most disturbing search terms are the mother-son coupling and the fact that someone would even have the interest to type in "francesco marciuliano divorce."

That said, my absolute favorite is "a 5 panel comic strip on a friday night" if only because I can imagine someone returning home at the end of a grueling work week, pouring themselves a drink, kicking off their shoes, sitting on the couch and saying, "What I want--no, what I need--are not one, not two, not three and not four panels of hilarity but..."

With the Presidential Election only one more day away, some of you may still be trying to make heads-or-tails of a little something called the Electoral College. Now while I in no way profess to being an American history expert, I did attend a university with a fixed address and have access to Google. So in the spirit of public edification that this site was founded on, I am proud provide you with the following short summary:

The Electoral College and You...Minus YouThe Electoral College was devised by the Framers of the Constitution as America's last stand against the democracy it had fought long and hard to secure. Of course, by "democracy" our forefathers meant "mob rule" and by "mob" they, curiously enough, meant Sicilians. In an attempt to prevent the rabble from running roughshod over the government and middle America putting a Hummel figurine or Disney character in charge, the Framers decided that each state would choose electors equal to that state's number of Senate and House seats combined. The electors would then meet in their states and burn a witch. If the witch emitted a plume of white smoke, then there would be a new Pope. The Pope would then realize that most Americans view Catholicism as an outgrowth of voodoo and so quickly assume the shape of a swan to allude grievous harm. While as a swan, he would then impregnate an unsuspecting or drunk Greek woman, who in turn would give birth to the next President of the United States. Unless, of course, no witch, Pope, swan or whatever achieved a majority of the vote, in which case the tallest non-twin individual in America would become Emperor.

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Pens the comic strips Sally Forth and Medium Large. Writes for The Onion News Network. Serves as head writer for the PBS series SeeMore's Playhouse (for which his script won two regional Emmys). Was afraid of the color yellow until about age nine. Tans a little too well to be trusted by security.

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A simple grilled cheese sandwich. Something that can be procured anywhere at any time. Nothing too exciting, right?

But what if I put a little butter on the bread before I grilled that sandwich? That would add a little extra zing, right? And what if instead of using plain old American cheese I opted for something a tad more exotic, like Camembert, Stilton or Roquefort? Now we're talking, right?

And what if instead of using bread for my grilled cheese sandwich I used two large blocks of pure platinum? And what if instead of eating the platinum I sold it and then used that small fortune as venture capital for a Beijing-based conglomerate that could take advantage of Chinese local business incentives, cheap labor, lax environmental laws and surging global interest in the fastest-growing economy in the world, thereby ensuring returns in the billions of dollars even in the face of a collapsing U.S. dollar and a massive industrial shift from the technical to service business sector? Wouldn't that be nice?

That's exactly what Francesco Explains It All is. In an endless buffet of indistinguishable tastes, it's the grilled platinum Stilton cheese sandwich that could forever destabilize geoeconomics. Care for a bite?